The purpose of this paper is to uncover the social, technological and environmental need for the development of Open Lean Electricity Supply Communities (OLESC). It is argued that the development of such communities in the future should focus on increasingly serving markets of one for lean and green electricity. Within these markets electricity service providers will offer the opportunity to their customers to design individual demand load profiles through setting up virtual private networks to fit individual needs. Communities of this kind will enable just-in-time, mass customized, as opposed to just-in-case, mass supplied electricity. Integration of locally available renewable energy sources upon demand will enhance openness and customizability of electricity generated. Mass customizing electricity reduces the environmental impact and lowers electricity needs with respect to mass production due to just-in-time on demand production and elimination of all types of waste. A combination of appropriate distributed energy systems and leading edge information and communication technology to provide customized electricity is necessary. The fundamental components of the required information systems architecture in order to enable OLESC are presented.

No abstract

No abstract

The paper proposes the design of an innovative management model for supply networks. This model promote the requirement of the close cooperation and adaptability as well as flexibility of ad-hoc structures throughout the supply network of custom made products and services. Structures of this type will respect principles that differ from the classical model of the industrial age, and evolve towards self organising and self adapting entities. This type of structures will be organised, so that they provide flexible interfaces for plugging and adapting fairly quickly into other ad-hoc cooperations for the purpose of providing custom made products and services. Once the purpose for which this "Virtual Integration" has taken place, has been served, integration can be abandoned partially or completely and other structures can be formed in order to continue offering custom made and individual products or services in a new form.

The competition of tomorrow is moving away from the level of the individual company and towards the level of supply chain. It is at this level that Lean organisations should evolve and become more flexible, self organising and self adapting entities. Today Lean implementations are based on principles with no clear scope as to how to achieve middle to long term benefits at the level of the extended enterprise. The objective is mostly based on achieving short term benefits through the implementation of mere techniques at the individual factory level. Therefore a new theory is needed to incorporate a set of practical rules. The approach for the interrelationship between theory and practice of Lean is based on systems thinking and the objectives of the learning enterprise. Lean should be practiced in conjunction with Open Innovation based upon customer-driven value creation and not merely customer-driven demand. The Lean extended enterprise should evolve towards a continuously learning organisation through customer integration in the product development and deployment cycle.